Hello all,

I just saw the press release for the 'citizens' summit and feel I have
to say something.

I have a quite strong objection to the use of the term 'citizen,' both
in the discourse of 'citizen journalism' and here in what is supposed to
be a progressive alternative to the meeting of the governments.

 From wikipedia: "Citizenship is membership in a political community
(originally a city but now usually a state), and carries with it rights
to political participation; a person having such membership is a citizen."

By the same token, non-membership in the state carries with it denial of
rights to political participation; a person lacking such membership is
not only a non-citizen but may exist in a liminal space of lack of
rights, from lack of freedom of movement and communication, lack of
access to health and education, all the way to status as 'illegal,'
subject to being hunted, detained indefinitely without trial, and
deportation.

The language of citizenship by definition excludes millions of migrants,
refugees, peoples displaced by conflicts and by economic globalization,
and (in the EU for example) a growing number of people born within the
nation-state but to noncitizen parents.

The objection to the language of citizenship should be all the more
forceful in the context of WSIS, where like it or not, although not
present in the official discourse, there has been a significant presence
of firms selling information technologies designed to increase border
surveillance and control of migration. If you think this is an
overreaction I'll be happy to show you my identity card from Geneva,
where a vendor in the exhibition hall eagerly demonstrated how my
retinal scan and thumbprint could be embedded in a card with an rfid
chip and printed out within the space of 3 minutes. He was there to
pursue contracts with the UNHCR (Commision for Refugees), the
International Organization for Migration, and a long list of states.

If there was already a conversation about this and a decision for
concrete reasons to keep the term, then I apologize for writing late. If
not, I encourage us all to think twice before using the rhetoric of
citizenship in the future.

peace,
sasha